You may remember that when Windows 11 first came out in late 2021, there was a lot of buzz about VBS (virtualization-based security) slowing down games – and on a side note, there were a few more controversies surrounding this security feature.
Entering the stage from the left (perhaps under a roll of thunder) report from Tom’s Hardware (will open in a new tab)with our sister site, which recently did a whole bunch of tests on video cards, after which it turned out: namely, that VBS was enabled.
The point is that Tom’s senior editor who wrote the report, Jarred Walton, had previously disabled VBS, but at some point a Windows 11 update (presumably) brought the feature back and enabled it again without Walton’s knowledge. (In Windows 11, VBS is now enabled by default for new OS installations).
Walton goes on to note that Tom’s editor-in-chief, Avram Piltch, uses Windows 10 Home and hasn’t touched VBS since a clean install of the OS last summer, but VBS was also enabled on that system. Again, we can assume that this happened via an update at some point (though note, we don’t know this for sure).
In short, Microsoft wants the feature enabled for tighter Windows security – apparently – and is apparently turning it back on by default on all PCs (most likely during major updates). But if users aren’t aware that VBS is being turned back on and it could negatively affect frame rates in games, well, that’s a bit of a nuisance to say the least.
Ever since the launch of Windows 11, we’ve heard stories of VBS dropping frame rates in some cases, with frame rates dropping up to 30%. This has now turned out to be the worst case scenario as Tom was doing his own testing at the time which showed the drop averaging around 5% (still a noticeable drop in frame rate).
With that in mind, what impact is VBS having these days? Walton was curious, so he ran a series of tests to find out using an Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card (with different resolutions and graphics settings in over 15 games).
Will VBS have a noticeable impact on gaming performance with the new Intel Core i9-13900K processor and state-of-the-art GPU?
The performance drop appears to be about the same as it was in the previous test a year and a half ago, with VBS overall reducing performance by about 5%. At higher resolutions, the impact was less: just 2% at ultra settings in 4K.
There were games where things were worse than you can imagine. Tom’s Hardware highlights Microsoft Flight Simulator, which saw its average frame rate drop by about 10%. Far Cry 6 and Control also saw drops of 10% or so (at 1080p with certain graphics settings, anyway). Other games were much less affected, and in some cases didn’t notice a difference at all.
Analysis: This may be a difficult choice, but we must make it ourselves.
It appears that VBS is still pretty much the same as it was when you first started Windows 11, in terms of slowing down games by an average of about 5% when dropping frame rates (frames per second).
So nothing has changed in the overall big picture, but what has changed is that Microsoft now appears to include VBS post-updates, at least in some cases (and this may be true for both Windows 10 and Windows 10 systems). for Windows 11).
This is worrying because the choice of “VBS or not VBS” should be yours – and you don’t have to worry about the operating system manufacturer deciding you shouldn’t be without this security feature and turning it on without your knowledge. At the very least, if Microsoft believes this is the path it should take, this step should be documented somewhere in the patch release notes or some effort should be made to inform the user.
The question of whether or not to disable VBS is a tricky one. On the one hand, this is a security feature, and Microsoft clearly thinks it would be foolish not to use it; hence the reverse inclusion. It can also be argued that for many games the impact is minimal (as we can see when testing Tom).
However, there is some impact, and a 10% slowdown in remote cases is a hefty penalty to pay. Especially for enthusiastic gamers who are obsessed with tuning their PCs to squeeze every extra frame out of them – a tenth drop in fps is akin to how such an enthusiast has a lead weight tied to his legs.
Also, while VBS can be undeniably important in business PC scenarios, for the average home user, there are those who argue that it’s overkill and maybe not even necessary. Again, on the other hand, Microsoft has indicated in the past that VBS can be a useful additional line of defense against some malicious attacks.
Ultimately, this decision is up to you, the types of games you play and whether you play them competitively, and how careful you can be about security. But to be honest, what’s rather puzzling here is that Microsoft seems to be making these decisions for the users, which is what it seems to be doing now.
